WAYNE TOWNSHIP The Infant Development Program, Parents As Teachers and children met recently at the Wayne Township Nature Park for a Group Connection eve
When I drove over to 91-year-old Elayne Hoffman’s Caulfield house in June 2021, she had heard that I was seeking to interview Jewish Australians with Greek heritage. Alert, hospitable and very thoughtful, Hoffmann was generous with her time and was happy to tell me about her family history.
“My parents were both born in Salonika in Greece,” she said, “but they left Greece and took me with as a 6-month-old baby to Paris in search of better opportunities in 1927.”
When the Hoffmann family immigrated from Greece, they left behind a country that had been the ancestral home for hundreds of years. “My family had been in Greece since the time of the Spanish inquisition in 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal,” she said. “My father’s family was involved in building the port in Salonika and many generations of her family had prospered in Greece.”